Skype offers partial API reprieve to call recorders and hardware apps

The API is still going away, but these core tasks will be kept alive.

If you've started up the Skype desktop application recently, you may have been greeted with a message telling you that any third-party applications you use, including call recorders, hardware add-ons, and non-Skype chat clients, will stop working come this December. While non-Skype chat clients are still set to be disabled, the company announced today that call recorders and hardware add-ons will continue to work for the indefinite future.

This decision has been greeted with dismay both by users of such applications and by their developers. Call recorders in particular serve an important role. Skype has no recording faculties of its own, but when used in conjunction with recorders, it has found itself a core part of the podcaster's toolset, as it's a great tool for recording interviews. Journalists, too, routinely use Skype for recording phone calls.

These functions were jeopardized by Skype's decision to deprecate and remove the extension API that its desktop client includes. Skype's rationale for this decision was that the API design wasn't appropriate to the way Skype is used today. The company has made infrastructural changes to better support low-power, occasionally connected mobile clients, including a move away from peer-to-peer design and greater messaging abilities to accommodate offline clients. It claimed that the desktop API was another casualty of this move toward a more mobile world.

These applications have been given a partial reprieve. Skype says that these parts of its API will remain enabled for a while longer. How much longer is still to be determined: the company says that it will keep it around until it determines "alternative options" for call recording... or decides to just retire the current API anyway.